On the left edge, there's a 3.5mm headphone jack (which takes standard stereo headphones), the USB jack and a dedicated button for activating the voice dialing application. On the right edge, you'll find volume up and down buttons and a dedicated camera button that turns the camera on if it's off and releases the shutter if it's on. This is all similar to the Pearl.

The software interface is similar to other recent BlackBerries. The customizable quick-pick home screen shows a few application links, but pressing the dedicated menu button takes you to a screen showing all application and utility links.

Don't get too excited about the extra .7 megapixels of resolution from the Curve's camera (compared to the Pearl's). To my eyes, it still produces fuzzy, noisy pictures, like most phone cameras. The best images are maybe good enough to print at 3 x 5 inches. Most are only worth viewing on a small screen.

As with the Pearl, the built-in flash still doesn't fire very often when in Auto mode (and will run your battery down faster if you fire it for every shot). This means the camera takes pictures indoors at shutter speeds too slow to hold the camera steady, with the result that most images are blurred. The advertised 5X zoom ratio is a myth. It's digital, not optical, zoom, meaning the camera selects a portion of the scene in the center of the frame. You don't really get any closer. Also, still no video.

The inclusion of a stereo headset (which doubles as a hands-free phone) is a welcome improvement over the Pearl (which only included a monaural hands-free phone). Also welcome is the fact that the headset plugs into a standard 3.5mm stereo jack rather than the mini-jack used on the Pearl and some other recent smartphones. This means you can plug in virtually any stereo headphone.

The Curve actually sounds pretty good as a music player, though in tests using audiophile headphones, it was no match for my three-year-old Creative Zen player, the benchmark I use for comparing the sound from digital music players. The music player supports a long list of formats.

With the Curve, RIM is introducing a new Roxio Media Manager module for the BlackBerry Desktop Manager 4.2.2, the program that runs on your PC and manages synchronizing data between computer and BlackBerry.

The module works like PC media manager programs for MP3 players, letting you select files from any folder on the host computer (or devices connected on a local network) and drag and drop them to any folder on the BlackBerry or an installed memory card. You can also set it up to automatically import new files to its library as you add them to your PC. And it includes a Photo Suite with basic editing and slideshow functionality.

Sonic Solutions, the company that developed the software, may not have worked out all the bugs yet. It did not install cleanly on my plain-vanilla Dell laptop. It stalled in the middle and reported a missing installation file, then somehow found it after some clicking around on the error screens. And when I launched the application, it kept telling me to "activate mass storage mode on the device," even when that had already been done.

Bottom line: I'd choose the Curve over the Pearl every time, but those who don't like the squarer form factor you get when you make room for a full QWERTY keyboard may not like it as much. Kudos to RIM for correcting some of the flaws in the Pearl, but the camera still stinks and it would have been nice to include even a 1GB microSD card (worth about $30 at retail) so you don't immediately have to go out and spend more money to use the thing for what it was designed.